You stir dry vermouth and gin with ice then poured into a chilled cocktail glass. The amount of vermouth has gone through two distinct stages of reduction. The first was the increasing quality of the ingredients, so you didn’t need to bury the bathtub aspects of the gin. The second is the decreasing quality of some drinkers, who think that forgetting one ingredient of a two ingredient cocktail is somehow sophisticated. There are people right now with “Left” and “Right” written on their shoes, and even when they get that wrong they’re still doing better than the people who call a glass of gin a martini because they’ve at least remembered both of the relevant items.

There’s a lot of really exciting stuff happening in the gin world right now, and I love that gins are becoming more expressive and flavorful. Companies are playing with flavors such as peaches, lemongrass, sage, and douglas fir, and the results are amazing. The new diverse range of flavors in these different gins welcome new flavor combinations and innovative cocktails! All of these gins are so gorgeous, they don’t need much dressing up, a simple martini with a complimentary garnish will do the trick!

The estate asks us to distinguish between “flat” and“round” fictional characters, potentially a sharper distinctionthan the other one it urges (as we noted at the beginning ofthis opinion), which is between simple and complex. Repeatedlyat the oral argument the estate’s lawyer dramatizedthe concept of a “round” character by describing large circleswith his arms. And the additional details about Holmes andWatson in the ten late stories do indeed make for a more“rounded,” in the sense of a fuller, portrayal of these characters.In much the same way we learn things about Sir JohnFalstaff in Henry IV, Part 2, in Henry V (though he doesn’t actuallyappear in that play but is merely discussed in it), andin The Merry Wives of Windsor, that were not remarked in hisfirst appearance, in Henry IV, Part 1. Notice also that HenryV, in which Falstaff is reported as dying, precedes The MerryWives, in which he is very much alive. Likewise the ten lastSherlock Holmes stories all are set before 1914, which wasthe last year in which the other stories were set. One of theten, The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger (published in 1927), isset in 1896. See 2 William S. Baring-Gould, The AnnotatedSherlock Holmes 453 (1967). Thus a more rounded Holmes orWatson (or Falstaff) is found in a later work depicting ayounger person. We don’t see how that can justify extendingthe expired copyright on the flatter character. A contemporaryexample is the six Star Wars movies: Episodes IV, V, andVI were produced before I, II, and III. The Doyle estatewould presumably argue that the copyrights on the characters as portrayed in IV, V, and VI will not expire until thecopyrights on I, II, and III expire.

The estate defines “flat” characters oddly, as ones completelyand finally described in the first works in which theyappear. Flat characters thus don’t evolve. Round charactersdo; Holmes and Watson, the estate argues, were not fullyrounded off until the last story written by Doyle. What thishas to do with copyright law eludes us. There are the earlyHolmes and Watson stories, and the late ones, and featuresof Holmes and Watson are depicted in the late stories thatare not found in the early ones (though as we noted in thepreceding paragraph some of those features are retrofitted tothe earlier depictions). Only in the late stories for exampledo we learn that Holmes’s attitude toward dogs haschanged—he has grown to like them—and that Watson hasbeen married twice. These additional features, being (wemay assume) “original” in the generous sense that the wordbears in copyright law, are protected by the unexpired copyrightson the late stories. But Klinger wants just to copy theHolmes and the Watson of the early stores, the stories nolonger under copyright. The Doyle estate tells us that “noworkable standard exists to protect the Ten Stories’ incrementalcharacter development apart from protecting thecompleted characters.” But that would be true only if theearly and the late Holmes, and the early and the late Watson,were indistinguishable—and in that case there would be noincremental originality to justify copyright protection of the“rounded” characters (more precisely the features thatmakes them “rounder,” as distinct from the features theyshare with their earlier embodiments) in the later works.

Must re-read that opinion.

One doesn’t normally get Holmes, Watson, Star Wars and Falstaff in federal courts of appeals opinions (especially within five hundred words of one another).